All atwitter

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

It is no surprise that jazz is slightly harder to come across in Ottawa than in Toronto. In T.O., you just walk into The Rex any night of the week, and you're guaranteed some mind-blowing music.Up till now, I've only been frequenting Cafe Nostalgica on Wednesday nights where my friend and teacher Yves Laroche usually plays with his trio.But it turns out there's much more jazz in town, as I've found out when I subscribed to Gavin McClintock's newsletter, Ottawa Jazz Happenings. Turns out there's something going on pretty well every night! The only problem with that newsletter is, for an organizationally challenged person such as myself it can be pretty hard to act on this information. That's why I've punched in the events from that newsletter into a public calendar. I'll try to keep it updated.

Oh and I also came upon the Ottawa Citizen Jazz Blog today which I had no idea about. Great!

Finally, I've received some sheet music from sheetmusicplus.com today. I'm very happy with their prices, they're typically around 50% of those of the local stores', and their catalog is much larger than that of Amazon. The only drawback with them is shipping: their cheapest option to ship to Canada is about as expensive as Amazon.com's, but while it typically takes under a week for me to get books from Amazon.com, here it took me almost a month.

Friends

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" — was that it? — "I prefer men to cauliflowers" — was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished-how strange it was! — a few sayings like this about cabbages.